Business improvement areas and the socio-cultural power of lobbying: Imposing market interests to affordable housing development

Abstract

While studies have shown that Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) manage and control their physical urban spaces to generate local economic growth, little work has examined how these organizations lobby for their market interests during key decision-making processes. Drawing from the pragmatic sociology of critique, this paper develops a theoretical framework to explain how political-economic power is socio-culturally encoded during local government decision-making processes. Socio-cultural power is defined through two interrelated processes: (1) interactional settings where social actors practice their critical capacity by drawing upon socio-historically created moral orders and (2) the extent to which institutional experts limit laypersons' critical capacity and successfully construct local realities to advance their agendas. This framework is applied to London, Ontario's Old East Village to show how the local BIA influenced two separate affordable housing development plans. Based on interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, the findings show that the Old East Village BIA strategically framed and co-opted community critiques of these developments in a way that justified their own market interests (more feet on the street) over the community's civic interests (the provision of affordable housing). This paper extends the BIA literature by demonstrating BIA influence over affordable housing development, local matters that are outside the purview of their commercial jurisdiction.

Fifty years of Business Improvement Districts: A reappraisal of the dominant perspectives and debates

“…Whether policy experts legitimising the BID model to global audiences, or government officials and business coalitions legitimising the need for BIDs to local audiences, or BIDs legitimising the need for stricter social control tactics, argumentation, justification and negotiation have received ample empirical attention in the existing BID literature. The process of legitimisation, as well as of contestation, needs to be analysed to highlight the specific ways that the merits of BIDs and their organisational agendas are constructed as appropriate, right, good and so on (see Kudla, 2021). Doing so can help highlight how neoliberalism is socio-culturally encoded during key situations where social actors meet to discuss and debate social action (e.g.…”

“…While some research has documented how BIDs govern their own members (see Catungal and Leslie, 2009;Lippert, 2012), future work should examine the specific ways BIDs selectively manage which businesses should and should not be present as well as how they manage 'undesirable' businesses that interfere with 'quality consumption conduct'. Also, while some work has found that BIDs help gentrify nearby residential areas in order to provide a more affluent customer base to their commercial districts (Hackworth and Rekers, 2005;Lewis, 2010;Valli and Hammami, 2021), future work should pay closer attention to the relationships BIDs establish with residential developers and the discursive strategies they use to justify gentrification strategies (see Kudla, 2021). Work should continue to explore whether BIDs' seemingly supportive programmes aimed at marginalised groups are truly addressing the structural causes of poverty or, as Didier et al (2013) found, whether these are merely attempts to temper local resistance against their social control tactics.…”

Carving a place for UK business improvement districts through COVID: exploring industry responses and practices during the pandemic

“…A mixed-methods, exploratory, sequential approach is used to draw insights from BID managers across the UK, with the main themes and subthemes which arose based on BIDs’ interactions with businesses and other place stakeholders during the pandemic then presented. Overall, we argue that the COVID crisis and response has provided a platform for BIDs to reframe their current identity of a mobile policy paradigmatic of regulatory, market-driven urban governance (Kudla, 2021; Stein et al , 2017) to one of a more locally bound, strategic, place-based body with a more direct role in place management decisions.…”

“…Further research could include exploring exactly how BIDs have used their DMF expertise in practice once the COVID pandemic has subsided, by looking at COVID's tangible influence on the industry's evolution, as well as understanding if BIDs have legitimised their post-COVID identity, and in what ways (e.g. lobbying for more control) (Kudla, 2021).…”

Business improvement districts, class turf war and the strategic weaponisation of class monopoly rent

“…BIDs have more recently been examined as 'assemblages' of myriad 'actors, agendas, and interests [that] territorialize differently and with varying degrees of ideological coherence in articulation with specific sociospatial histories' (Rankin andDelaney, 2011: 1364; also see Kudla, 2021;Kudla and Courey, 2019;Lippert, 2012). This approach understands neoliberal urbanism as a contingently manifest and incomplete process 'through which political economic restructurings are mediated [by] local political and social histories' (Rankin andDelaney, 2011: 1367).…”